


The Great After

by jazzonia



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Detective
Genre: A slayer and a savant addict preacher detective walk into a bar..., Crossover, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mild Language, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-series (Buffy), True Detective season 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-11
Updated: 2014-03-11
Packaged: 2018-01-15 08:05:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1297555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzonia/pseuds/jazzonia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“How did it feel?” she asks, and Rust feels his mouth open before he can think to stop it.</i><br/><i>“Warm,” he says. “And then—”</i><br/><i>“Then they woke you up.” </i><br/> <br/>The day after he leaves the hospital, Rust gets a visit from a woman who knows a thing or two about dying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Great After

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes crossovers hit you like a Mack truck in the moment before sleep. Thank you to J for the beta read and E&T for fueling my True Detective obsession. I imagine this taking place in a bar resembling the last photo in [this series](http://definitionsfading.tumblr.com/post/103920818953).

Rust didn’t know what to do, afterward. Only took about ten minutes wheezing on the couch in Marty’s sad little bachelor pad for him to miss his own particular shithole. He passed out for the night on Marty’s couch, no helping that, but in the morning Marty threw some bandages and frozen TV dinners into a shopping bag and dropped Rust off at the bar, eager to keep a lunch date he’d made with his girls.

Rust was unmoored, was the thing. Chasing the Yellow King had reanimated his dumb drunk frozen corpse of a body, had pulled him back to Louisiana like some magnetic voodoo shit cooked up in the dark corners of the bayou. And he had liked it. He had. Took no pleasure in it, mind you—didn’t relish seeing the calcified sadness in the eyes of the missing girls’ daddies any more than the images seared in ghostly negatives on the backs of his eyelids. But in retrospect he sees that it had agreed with him, that desperate half-starved pursuit of something more legend than man. At first it felt like he’d been scaling the tree of knowledge, all height and adrenaline and discovery; later, lying on the concrete floor of the storage unit, it looked more like some fucked-up four-dimensional web of perversion and depravity that had already ensnared him. 

He sees now what he’d really been after, thinking he could exorcise Louisiana with sheer stubbornness and a stolen tape. Now he knows better. Now, saddled with an ‘after’ that he never expected, Rust finds himself sulking like a stray dog back to the only place he could call home. Marty breaks him out of the hospital on a Tuesday, and by Wednesday afternoon Rust is polishing glasses with Robert slumped over a warm Lone Star at the end of the bar. 

Rust likes tending bar because it busies the hands and quiets the mind, insofar as that is possible. Drinking had done the same thing, of course, but at this moment Rust doesn’t crave that looseness of thought. He doesn’t have patience for languid philosophizing, and maybe never will again. Come to think of it, he can hardly remember why he’d liked drinking in the first place. He’s lost his taste for oblivion—already feels less like a man and more like a boat far out at sea, or an asteroid flung out of orbit to wheel away infinitely, or a superfluous electron shed into stagnant staticky intracellular limbo.

Shit, there he goes again.

A flash in the dirty mirror, and Rust raises his eyes—the one eye, really, given the lingering swelling—to see a young woman climb out of a dusky blue pickup. He turns to face her as she walks in, flicks across her jacket and belt and ankles in an instinctual sweep for weapons. Childress might be gone, but there remain plenty of reasons in Louisiana to keep an eye on one’s back.

The woman, oddly, does the same. Scans his waist and what she can see of the underside of the bar, no doubt noticing the protective hunch of his spine. Seats herself in the opposite corner as Robert, her back to the wall and both exits in her peripherals.

Huh.

“What can I do you for, miss?”

She orders a vodka tonic, and watches Rust with knowing eyes as he moves gutshot-slow to make one. 

He wonders how old she is. Blonde enough and tan enough and a woman could appear damn near ageless, but there is something world-weary about her that Rust understands better than most anything. He places her drink down in front of her, returning her nod, and lingers to polish the taps to her left. 

“Shot or stabbed?” she asks after a few sips.

“Nasty stab—one good one, nearly did the job.”

“I know the feeling.” Her mouth twists, less grin than grimace. “Aim well and it only takes the one.”

“Guess it was my lucky day,” Rust says, focusing on the spiral of streaks his rag is leaving on the bar even as his mind begins to slip-slide back down to that perfect fleeting darkness. 

“Hey. Hey, up here,” the woman says, reaching forward. She turns what Rust is sure would have been a slap on the cheek if she’d been closer to him into a beckon. He forces himself to look up from the counter and meet her unflinching gaze. 

“How did it feel?” she asks, and Rust feels his mouth open before he can think to stop it.

“Warm,” he says. “And then—”

“Then they woke you up.” 

Rust grips the bar to stay upright in the face of such vertiginous recognition. The woman’s smile is closer to the real thing this time, tinged with an empathy that Rust would prefer never to find in another person’s eyes.

“I said I know the feeling, didn’t I?” she says. “You’re still fresh out of it, but you’ll learn to see the echoes in other people. Give it sixteen years and you’ll catch up, don’t worry. I could sense you from the road.”

“I don’t want to,” Rust whispers. “I don’t want anyone else to know—to know that anyone else has had to—”

The woman shrugs, swirling the ice in her glass with one manicured nail. “You don’t have a choice there. People die, all kinds of people all over the world, and some of us get yanked back.”

She stands, setting her purse on the bar as she digs around for change. “It gets easier. Never easy, but it’s less of a surprise each time. People are resilient. You might not believe that right now, and you don’t have to. It’s going to take some time. But,” she paused, looking up to meet his eyes, “you’re different now. It’s time to figure out what’s next.”

She takes a last look at him, nods, then puts on her sunglasses and starts toward the door. “It was nice to meet you, Rust.”

Robert grunts in his sleep, snapping Rust out of his stupor. 

“Hey,” he calls after her, and she pauses halfway out the door, the light turning her hair into a bright golden crown. “Be careful on these back roads. There’s more trouble out here than most folks think.”

The woman laughs.

“You don’t know the half of it, mister.” 

He watches her go, registering for the first time the coiled strength in her gait. She’d had no gun on her, but he sees now that she does not need one. The door closes, and Rust sinks down onto the barstool. He arches his back and feels the pull of his stitches, eyes closed against the ache he can feel building behind them. If he gets moving now he can lock the door and catch a few minutes’ sleep before Robert wakes up and the regulars start coming in.

Rust hauls himself to his feet and limps over to grab the woman’s half-empty glass. He picks up the napkin she left behind and squints at the message scrawled on it, turning his back to the windows so he can see by the dim cool mid-afternoon light. 

He reads it, folds it carefully, and exhales.

Then he breathes in deep, smelling the dirt and the damp and the sick and the rot, but also something else underneath, something new. 

It feels like the first breath he’s taken in years—lungs full, head clear, hands steady, eyes open. 

 

 

_That place is still waiting for us._

_No need to rush there._

_-B. Summers_

_(415) 555-3301_


End file.
